I could not account for this. One evening at a dinner Mr. Blaineenlightened me. We sat together at table and suddenly he turned and said:"How are you getting on with your bill?" And my reply being rather halting,he continued, "You won't get a vote in either House," and he proceededvery humorously to improvise the average member's argument against it asa dangerous power, a perquisite to the great newspapers and an impositionupon the little ones. To my mind this was something more than thepost-prandial levity it was meant to be.

Not long after a learned but dissolute old lawyer said to me, "You need noact of Congress to protect your news service. There are at least two, and Ithink four or five, English rulings that cover the case. Let me show themto you." He did so and I went no further with the business, quite agreeingwith Mr. Blaine, and nothing further came of it. To a recent date theAssociated Press has relied on these decisions under the common law ofEngland. Curiously enough, quite a number of newspapers in whose actualservice I was engaged, opened fire upon me and roundly abused me.

II

There appeared upon the scene in Washington toward the middle of theseventies one of those problematical characters the fiction-mongers delightin. This was John Chamberlin. During two decades "Chamberlin's," halfclubhouse and half chophouse, was all a rendezvous.

"John" had been a gambler; first an underling and then a partner of thefamous Morrissy-McGrath racing combination at Saratoga and Long Branch.There was a time when he was literally rolling in wealth. Then he wentbroke--dead broke. Black Friday began it and the panic of '73 finishedit. He came over to Washington and his friends got him the restaurantprivileges of the House of Representatives. With this for a starting point,he was able to take the Fernando Wood residence, in the heart of thefashionable quarter, to add to it presently the adjoining dwelling ofGovernor Swann, of Maryland, and next to that, finally, the Blainemansion, making a suite, as it were, elegant yet cozy. "Welcker's," erst afashionable resort, and long the best eating-place in town, had been ruinedby a scandal, and "Chamberlin's" succeeded it, having the field to itself,though, mindful of the "scandal" which had made its opportunity, ladieswere barred.

There was a famous cook--Emeline Simmons--a mulatto woman, who was equallyat home in French dishes and Maryland-Virginia kitchen mysteries--a verywonder with canvasback and terrapin--who later refused a great money offerto he chef at the White House--whom John was able to secure. Nothing couldsurpass--could equal--her preparations. The charges, like the victuals,were sky-high and tip-top. The service was handled by three "coloredgentlemen," as distinguished in manners as in appearance, who were knownfar and wide by name and who dominated all about them, including John andhis patrons.

No such place ever existed before, or will ever exist again. It was thepersonality of John Chamberlin, pervasive yet invisible, exhaling a silent,welcoming radiance. General Grant once said to me, "During my eight yearsin the White House, John Chamberlin once in a while--once in a greatwhile--came over. He did not ask for anything. He just told me what to do,and I did it." I mentioned this to President Arthur. "Well," he laughinglysaid, "that has been my experience with John Chamberlin. It never crossesmy mind to say him 'nay.' Often I have turned this over in my thoughtto reach the conclusion that being a man of sound judgment and worldlyknowledge, he has fully considered the case--his case and my case--leavingme no reasonable objection to interpose."

John obtained an act of Congress authorizing him to build a hotel on theGovernment reservation at Fortress Monroe, and another of the VirginiaLegislature confirming this for the State. Then he came to me. It was atthe moment when I was flourishing as "a Wall Street magnate." He said: "Iwant to sell this franchise to some man, or company, rich enough to carryit through. All I expect is a nest egg for Emily and the girls"--he hadmarried the beautiful Emily Thorn, widow of George Jordan, the actor, andthere were two daughters--"you are hand-and-glove with the millionaires.Won't you manage it for me?" Like Grant and Arthur, I never thought ofrefusing. Upon the understanding that I was to receive no commission, Iagreed, first ascertaining that it was really a most valuable franchise.

I began with the Willards, in whose hotel I had grown up. They were richand going out of business. Then I laid it before Hitchcock and Darling, ofthe Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. They, rich like the Willards, werealso retiring. Then a bright thought occurred to me. I went to the PrinceImperial of Standard Oil. "Mr. Flagler," I said, "you have hotels at St.Augustine and you have hotels at Palm Beach. Here is a halfway pointbetween New York and Florida," and more of the same sort. "My dear friend,"he answered, "every man has the right to make a fool of himself once in hislife. This I have already done. Never again for me. I have put up mylast dollar south of the Potomac." Then I went to the King of thetranscontinental railways. "Mr. Huntington," I said, "you own a roadextending from St. Louis to Newport News, having a terminal in a cornfieldjust out of Hampton Roads. Here is a franchise which gives you amagnificent site at Hampton Roads itself. Why not?" He gazed upon me witha blank stare--such I fancy as he usually turned upon his suppliants--andslowly replied: "I would not spend another dollar in Virginia if the Lordcommanded me. In the event that some supernatural power should take theChesapeake & Ohio Railway by the nape of the neck and the seat of thebreeches and pitch it out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean it would bedoing me a favor."

So I returned John his franchise marked "nothing doing." Afterward he putit in the hands of a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had nobetter luck with it. Finally, here and there, literally by piecemeal, hegot together money enough to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had anotable opening with half of Congress there to see, and gently laid himselfdown and died, leaving little other than friends and debts.

III

Macaulay tells us that the dinner-table is a wondrous peacemaker, miracleworker, social solvent; and many were the quarrels composed and the plansperfected under the Chamberlin roof. It became a kind of CongressionalExchange with a close White House connection. If those old walls, which bythe way are still standing, could speak, what tales they might tell, whattestimonies refute, what new lights throw into the vacant corners and darkplaces of history!

Coming away from Chamberlin's with Mr. Blaine for an after-dinner strollduring the winter of 1883-4, referring to the approaching NationalRepublican Convention, he said: "I do not want the nomination. In myopinion there is but one nominee the Republicans can elect this year andthat is General Sherman. I have written him to tell him so and urge it uponhim. In default of him the time of you people has come." He subsequentlyshowed me this letter and General Sherman's reply. My recollection is thatthe General declared that he would not take the presidency if it wereoffered him, earnestly invoking Mr. Elaine to support his brother, JohnSherman.

This would seem clear refutation that Mr. Blaine was party to his ownnomination that year. It assuredly reveals keen political instinct andforesight. The capital prize in the national lottery was not for him.

I did not meet him until two years later, when he gave me a minute accountof what had happened immediately thereafter; the swing around the circle;Belshazzar's feast, as a fatal New York banquet was called; the far-famedBurchard incident. "I did not hear the words, 'Rum, Romanism andRebellion,'" he told me, "else, as you must know, I would have fittinglydisposed of them."

I said: "Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster,Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an assuredelection, you will die before the day of election. If you survive the dayand are elected, you'll die before the 4th of March." He smiled grimly andreplied: "It really looks that way."

My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominatedMr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote wouldscarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end ofit would have had some advantage--certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland'snearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly fewhundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who ran asan independent labor candidate, were actually counted for Cleveland.

When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: "Now we are even.History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once. Turn aboutmay be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it."

So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was tobe President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination forthe governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in the State conventionsure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have carried the Stateas Cleveland did, and Slocum, not Cleveland, would have been the ChiefMagistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleveand through.But in his case, as in many another, Providence "got there" in fulfilmentof a decree of Destiny.

Chapter the Nineteenth

Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of North and South Sectionalism

I

The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was setforth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kindof prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He wasa sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked backaffectionately upon the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poorschool-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the Househe and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their friendship whenboth of them had reached the Senate.

I inherited Mr. Blaine's desk in the Ways and Means Committee room. In oneof the drawers of this he had left a parcel of forgotten papers, whichI returned to him. He made a joke of the secrets they covered and thefortunate circumstance that they had fallen into the hands of a friend andnot of an enemy.

No man of his time could hold a candle to Mr. Blaine in what we callmagnetism--that is, in manly charm, supported by facility and brain power.Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party leadership before his time.He made a good third to them. I never knew Mr. Clay, but with Judge DouglasI was well acquainted, and the difference between him and Mr. Blaine inleadership might be called negligible.

Both were intellectually aggressive and individually amiable. They at leastseemed to love their fellow men. Each had been tried by many adventures.Each had gone, as it were, "through the flint mill." Born to goodconditions--Mr. Blaine sprang from aristocratic forebears--each knew byearly albeit brief experience the seamy side of life; as each, like Clay,nursed a consuming passion for the presidency. Neither had been made fora subaltern, and they chafed under the subaltern yoke to which fate hadcondemned them.

II

In Grover Cleveland a total stranger had arrived at the front of affairs.The Democrats, after a rule of more than half a century, had been out ofpower twenty-four years. They could scarce realize at first that they wereagain in power. The new chieftain proved more of an unknown quantity thanhad been suspected. William Dorsheimer, a life-long crony, had brought thetwo of us together before Cleveland's election to the governorship of theEmpire State as one of a group of attractive Buffalo men, most of whommight be said to have been cronies of mine, Buffalo being a delightfulhalfway stop-over in my frequent migrations between Kentucky and theEastern seaboard. As in the end we came to a parting of the ways I want towrite of Mr. Cleveland as a historian and not as a critic.

He said to Mr. Carlisle after one of our occasional tiffs: "Henry willnever like me until God makes me over again." The next time we met,referring to this, I said: "Mr. President, I like you very much--very muchindeed--but sometimes I don't like some of your ways."

There were in point of fact two Clevelands--before marriage and aftermarriage--the intermediate Cleveland rather unequal and indeterminate.Assuredly no one of his predecessors had entered the White House so whollyignorant of public men and national affairs. Stories used to be toldassigning to Zachary Taylor this equivocal distinction. But General Taylorhad grown up in the army and advanced in the military service to a chiefcommand, was more or less familiar with the party leaders of his time,and was by heredity a gentleman. The same was measurably true of Grant.Cleveland confessed himself to have had no social training, and heliterally knew nobody.

Five or six weeks after his inauguration I went to Washington to ask adiplomatic appointment for my friend, Boyd Winchester. Ill health had cutshort a promising career in Congress, but Mr. Winchester was now well on torecovery, and there seemed no reason why he should not and did not stand inthe line of preferment. My experience may be worth recording because it isillustrative.

In my quest I had not thought of going beyond Mr. Bayard, the new Secretaryof State. I did go to him, but the matter seemed to make no headway. Thereappeared a hitch somewhere. It had not crossed my mind that it might bethe President himself. What did the President know or care about foreignappointments?

He said to me on a Saturday when I was introducing a party of Kentuckyfriends: "Come up to-morrow for luncheon. Come early, for Rose"--hissister, for the time being mistress of the White House--"will be at churchand we can have an old-fashioned talk-it-out."

The next day we passed the forenoon together. He was full of homely andoften whimsical talk. He told me he had not yet realized what had happenedto him.

"Sometimes," he said, "I wake at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it isnot all a dream."

He asked an infinite number of questions about this, that and the otherDemocratic politician. He was having trouble with the Kentucky Congressmen.He had appointed a most unlikely scion of a well-known family to a foreignmission, and another young Kentuckian, the son of a New York magnate, to aleading consul generalship, without consultation with any one. He asked meabout these. In a way one of them was one of my boys, and I was glad to seehim get what he wanted, though he aspired to nothing so high. He was indeedall sorts of a boy, and his elevation to such a post was so grotesque thatthe nomination, like that of his mate, was rejected by the Senate. Igave the President a serio-comic but kindly account, at which he laughedheartily, and ended by my asking how he had chanced to make two suchappointments.

"Hewitt came over here," he answered, "and then Dorsheimer. The father isthe only Democrat we have in that great corporation. As to the other, hestruck me as a likely fellow. It seemed good politics to gratify them andtheir friends."

I suggested that such backing was far afield and not very safe to go by,when suddenly he said: "I have been told over and over again by you and byothers that you will not take office. Too much of a lady, I suppose! Whatare you hanging round Washington for anyhow? What do you want?"

Here was my opportunity to speak of Winchester, and I did so.

When I had finished he said: "What are you doing about Winchester?"

"Relying on the Secretary of State, who served in Congress with him andknows him well."

Then he asked: "What do you want for Winchester?"

I answered: "Belgium or Switzerland."

He said: "I promised Switzerland for a friend of Corning's. He broughthim over here yesterday and he is an out-and-out Republican who voted forBlaine, and I shall not appoint him. If you want the place for Winchester,Winchester it is."

Next day, much to Mr. Bayard's surprise, the commission was made out.

Mr. Cleveland had a way of sudden fancies to new and sometimes queerpeople. Many of his appointments were eccentric and fell like bombshellsupon the Senate, taking the appointee's home people completely by surprise.

The recommendation of influential politicians seemed to have little if anyweight with him.

There came to Washington from Richmond a gentleman by the name of Keiley,backed by the Virginia delegation for a minor consulship. The President atonce fell in love with him.

[Illustration: Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"]

"Consul be damned," he said. "He is worth more than that," and named himAmbassador to Vienna.

It turned out that Mrs. Keiley was a Jewess and would not be received atcourt. Then he named him Ambassador to Italy, when it appeared that Keileywas an intense Roman Catholic, who had made at least one ultramontanespeech, and would be _persona non grata_ at the Quirinal. ThenCleveland dropped him. Meanwhile poor Keiley had closed out bag and baggageat Richmond and was at his wit's end. After much ado the President wasbrought to a realizing sense and a place was found for Keiley as consulgeneral and diplomatic agent at Cairo, whither he repaired. At the endof the four years he came to Paris and one day, crossing the Place de laConcorde, he was run over by a truck and killed. He deserved a longercareer and a better fate, for he was a man of real capacity.

III

Taken to task by thick and thin Democratic partisans for my criticism ofthe only two Democratic Presidents we have had since the War of Sections,Cleveland and Wilson, I have answered by asserting the right and duty ofthe journalist to talk out in meeting, flatly repudiating the claims aswell as the obligations of the organ grinder they had sought to put uponme, and closing with the knife grinder's retort--

_Things have come to a hell of a pass When a man can't wallop his own jackass_.

In the case of Mr. Cleveland the break had come over the tariff issue.Reading me his first message to Congress the day before he sent it in, hehad said: "I know nothing about the tariff, and I thought I had best leaveit where you and Morrison had put it in the platform."

We had indeed had a time in the Platform Committee of the Chicagoconvention of 1884. After an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddlewas all that the committee could be brought to agree upon. The leadingrecalcitrant had been General Butler, who was there to make trouble and wholater along bolted the ticket and ran as an independent candidate.

One aim of the Democrats was to get away from the bloody shirt as an issue.Yet, as the sequel proved, it was long after Cleveland's day before thebloody shirt was laid finally to rest. It required a patriot and a herolike William McKinley to do this. When he signed the commissions of JosephWheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals and graduates of the WestPoint Military Academy, to be generals in the Army of the United States,he made official announcement that the War of Sections was over and gavecomplete amnesty to the people and the soldiers of the South.

Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked byboth parties.

IV

That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast ofself-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs oflocal nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallantGeneral Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers--shouldtear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising anindisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should electto send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in thenation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. Itmerely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred bypartyism. Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting wasthe order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore toounpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and theglory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess.In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy torepress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and ofcourse it was not possible to dissuade or placate them.

All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people ofthe United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so averse togetting into that war. A very small group of extremists and doctrinaireshad in the beginning made a War of Sections possible. Enough of thesesurvived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive.

It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it madethe presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no end ofobjurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered Northernerand ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E. Lee andBenedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not hesitate,if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it some profit tohimself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas Iscariot.

The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at Washington made the occasionfor this.

It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses ofCongress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench ofthe Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys extraordinaryin foreign lands. But McKinley's doing was the crowning stroke of union andpeace.

There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdyplant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancienthistory. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite ofextremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South ralliedequally with the North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine went downin the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at Santiagoand Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into the ChiefMagistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the maternal sidehe came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal applause, declaredthat no Southerner could he prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and StonewallJackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's brother, who had stood at thehead of the Confederate naval establishment in Europe and had fitted outthe Confederate cruisers, as the noblest and purest man he had ever known,a composite of Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond.

Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy ofJefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an Americanbattleship. This told the Mississippi's guests, wherever and whenever theymight meet round her hospitable board, of national unification and peace,giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous and conspicuousof the national cemeteries now stands the monument of a Confederate generalnot only placed there by consent of the Government, but dedicated withfitting ceremonies supervised by the Department of War, which sent as itsofficial representative the son of Grant, himself an army officer of rankand distinction.

The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country hasrisen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with increasingenthusiasm.

I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation andthen the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. Itwas an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and Seventies, andnow he who would thwart the unification of the country on the lines ofoblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws himself across thehighway of his country's future, and is a traitor equally to the essentialprinciples of free government and the spirit of the age.

If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popularconsideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. TheSouth, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographicexpression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the statesof the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of everysort exist.

These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and businessfabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strifethus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayerof every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonanceto that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore,except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival ofold sectional and partisan passions--if it were possible--be expected toreach?

V

Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. MulberrySellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciatedthe principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He did not claim theformula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, hispatriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship.

The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over asSenator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called, whoseoleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equalfacility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, toprayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist ofthe Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was aruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembledCruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff.

There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that matterAaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people ofGod did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, butwere reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, andthat the American republic was ordained of God to illustrate upon thetheater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrastwith the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do trulybelieve. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And thesecond is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by God to create it,and that Lincoln was raised up by God to save it; else why the militiacolonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason thatwas obvious at the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysteriousway his wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung overthe manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessedUnion.

Thus far it has weathered each historic danger which has gone before tomark the decline and fall of nations; the struggle for existence; theforeign invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed succession;religious bigotry and racial conflict. One other peril confrontsit--the demoralization of wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; theconcentration and the abuse of power. Shall we survive the lures with whichthe spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our waywardfootsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and pervertedreligion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty running tolicense, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a commodity ofglory--or under the process of a divine evolution shall we be able to mountand ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, which engulfed thephalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome, and which still beat the sidesand sweep the decks of Europe?

The one-party power we have escaped; the one-man power we have escaped. Thestars in their courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of thepeople are still watchful and alert. Truth is mightier than ever, andjustice, mounting guard even in the Hall of Statues, walks everywhere thebattlements of freedom!

Chapter the Twentieth

The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations

I

There were, as I have said, two Grover Clevelands--before and aftermarriage--and, it might be added, between his defeat in 1888 and hiselection in 1892. He was so sure of his election in 1888 that he could notbe induced to see the danger of the situation in his own State of New York,where David Bennett Hill, who had succeeded him in the governorship, was acandidate for reelection, and whom he personally detested, had become theruling party force. He lost the State, and with it the election, while Hillwon, and thereby arose an ugly faction fight.

I did not believe as the quadrennial period approached in 1892 that Mr.Cleveland could be elected. I still think he owed his election, andHarrison his defeat, to the Homestead riots of the midsummer, whichtransferred the labor vote bodily from the Republicans to the Democrats.Mainly on account of this belief I opposed his nomination that year.

In the Kentucky State Convention I made my opposition resonant, if noteffective. "I understand," I said in an address to the assembled delegates,"that you are all for Grover Cleveland?"

There came an affirmative roar.

"Well," I continued, "I am not, and if you send me to the NationalConvention I will not vote for his nomination, if his be the only namepresented, because I firmly believe that his nomination will mean themarching through a slaughter-house to an open grave, and I refuse to beparty to such a folly."

The answer of the convention was my appointment by acclamation, but it wasmany a day before I heard the last of my unlucky figure of speech.

Notwithstanding this splendid indorsement, I went to the NationalConvention feeling very like the traditional "poor boy at a frolic." Allseemed to me lost save honor and conviction. I had become the embodimentof my own epigram, "a tariff for revenue only." Mr. Cleveland, in thebeginning very much taken by it, had grown first lukewarm and thenfrightened. His "Free Trade" message of 1887 had been regarded by the partyas an answering voice. But I knew better.

In the national platform, over the protest of Whitney, his organizer, andVilas, his spokesman, I had forced him to stand on that gospel. He flewinto a rage and threatened to modify, if not to repudiate, the plank in hisletter of acceptance. We were still on friendly terms and, upon reachinghome, I wrote him the following letter. It reads like ancient history,but, as the quarrel which followed cut a certain figure in the politicalchronicle of the time, the correspondence may not be historically out ofdate, or biographically uninteresting:

II

MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND

Courier-Journal Office, Louisville, July 9, 1892.--My Dear Mr. President:I inclose you two editorial articles from the Courier-Journal, and, thattheir spirit and purpose may not be misunderstood by you, I wish to add aword or two of a kind directly and entirely personal.

To a man of your robust understanding and strong will, opposition andcriticism are apt to be taken as more or less unfriendly; and, as you areat present advised, I can hardly expect that any words of mine will bereceived by you with sentiments either of confidence or favor.

I was admonished by a certain distrust, if not disdain, visited upon thehonest challenge I ventured to offer your Civil Service policy, when youwere actually in office, that you did not differ from some other great menI have known in an unwillingness, or at least an inability, to accept,without resentment, the question of your infallibility. Nevertheless, I wasthen, as I am now, your friend, and not your enemy, animated by thesingle purpose to serve the country, through you, as, wanting your greatopportunities, I could not serve it through myself.

During the four years when you were President, I asked you but for onething that lay near my heart. You granted that handsomely; and, if youhad given me all you had to give beside, you could not have laid me undergreater obligation. It is a gratification to me to know, and it ought to besome warrant both of my intelligence and fidelity for you to remember thatthat matter resulted in credit to the Administration and benefit to thepublic service.

But to the point; I had at St. Louis in 1888 and at Chicago, the presentyear, to oppose what was represented as your judgment and desire in theadoption of a tariff plank in our national platform; successfully in bothcases. The inclosed articles set forth the reasons forcing upon me adifferent conclusion from yours, in terms that may appear to you bluntlyspecific, but I hope not personally offensive; certainly not by intention,for, whilst I would not suppress the truth to please you or any man, Ihave a decent regard for the sensibilities and the rights of all men,particularly of men so eminent as to be beyond the reach of anything exceptinsolence and injustice. Assuredly in your case, I am incapable of even somuch as the covert thought of either, entertaining for you absolute respectand regard. But, my dear Mr. President, I do not think that you appreciatethe overwhelming force of the revenue reform issue, which has made you itsidol.

[Illustration: A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Henry Watterson]

If you will allow me to say so, in perfect frankness and without intendingto be rude or unkind, the gentlemen immediately about you, gentlemen uponwhom you rely for material aid and energetic party management, are not, asto the Tariff, Democrats at all; and have little conception of the place inthe popular mind and heart held by the Revenue Reform idea, or, indeed ofany idea, except that of organization and money.

Of the need of these latter, no man has a more realizing sense, or largerinformation and experience, than I have. But they are merely the brakes andwheels of the engine, to which principles and inspirations are, and mustalways be, the elements of life and motion. It is to entreat you therefore,in your coming letter and address, not to underestimate the tremendousdriving power of this Tariff issue, and to beg you, not even to seem toqualify it, or to abridge its terms in a mistaken attempt to seem to beconservative.

You cannot escape your great message of 1887 if you would. I know it byheart, and I think that I perfectly apprehend its scope and tenor. Take itas your guiding star. Stand upon it. Reiterate it. Emphasize it, amplifyit, but do not subtract a thought, do not erase a word. For every votewhich a bold front may lose you in the East you will gain two votes in theWest. In the East, particularly in New York, enemies lurk in your verycupboard, and strike at you from behind your chair at table. There is morethan a fighting chance for Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, and next toa certainty in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, if you put yourselfpersonally at the head of the column which is moving in your name,supposing it to be another name for reduced taxes and freer exchanges.

Discouraged as I was by the condition of things in New York and Indianaprior to the Chicago Convention, depressed and almost hopeless by yournomination, I can see daylight, if you will relax your grip somewhat uponthe East and throw yourself confidently upon the West.

I write warmly because I feel warmly. If you again occupy the White House,and it is my most constant and earnest prayer that you may, be sure thatyou will not be troubled by me. I cannot hope that my motives in opposingyour nomination, consistent as you know them to have been, or that myconduct during the post-convention discussion and canvass, free as I knowit to have been of ill-feeling, or distemper, has escaped misrepresentationand misconception. I could not, without the loss of my self-respect,approach you on any private matter whatever; though it may not be amissfor me to say to you, that three weeks before the meeting of the NationalConvention, I wrote to Mr. Gorman and Mr. Brice urging the withdrawal ofany opposition, and declaring that I would be a party to no movement towork the two-thirds rule to defeat the will of the majority.

This is all I have to say, Mr. President, and you can believe it or not, asyou please; though you ought to know that I would write you nothing exceptin sincere conviction, nor speak to you, or of you, except in a candid andkindly spirit. Trusting that this will find you hale, hearty, and happy, Iam, dear sir, your fellow democrat and most faithful friend,

HENRY WATTERSON.

The Honorable Grover Cleveland.

III

MR. CLEVELAND TO MR. WATTERSON

By return mail I received this answer:

Gray Gables, Buzzards Bay, Mass., July 15, 1892.

MY DEAR MR. WATTERSON:

I have received your letter and the clippings you inclosed.

I am not sure that I understand perfectly all that they mean. One thingthey demonstrate beyond any doubt, to-wit: that you have not--I think I maysay--the slightest conception of my disposition. It may be that I knowas little about yours. I am surprised by the last paragraph of TheCourier-Journal article of July 8 and amazed to read the statementscontained in your letter, that you know the message of 1887 by heart. Itis a matter of very small importance, but I hope you will allow me to say,that in all the platform smashing you ever did, you never injured norinspired me that I have ever seen or heard of, except that of 1888. Iexcept that, so I may be exactly correct when I write, "seen or heardof,"--for I use the words literally.

I would like very much to present some views to you relating to the tariffposition, but I am afraid to do so.

I will, however, venture to say this: If we are defeated this year, Ipredict a Democratic wandering in the dark wilds of discouragement fortwenty-five years. I do not purpose to be at all responsible for such aresult. I hope all others upon whom rests the least responsibility willfully appreciate it.

The world will move on when both of us are dead. While we stay, andespecially while we are in any way concerned in political affairs and whilewe are members of the same political brotherhood, let us both resolve to bejust and modest and amiable. Yours very sincerely,

GROVER CLEVELAND.

Hon. Henry Watterson, Louisville, Ky.

IV

MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND

I said in answer:

Louisville, July 22, 1892.--My Dear Sir: I do not see how you couldmisunderstand the spirit in which I wrote, or be offended by my plainwords. They were addressed as from one friend to another, as from oneDemocrat to another. If you entertain the idea that this is a false viewof our relative positions, and that your eminence lifts you above bothcomradeship and counsels, I have nothing to say except to regret that, inunderestimating your breadth of character I exposed myself too contumely.

You do, indeed, ride a wave of fortune and favor. You are quite beyondthe reach of insult, real or fancied. You could well afford to be moretolerant.

In answer to the ignorance of my service to the Democratic party, which youare at such pains to indicate--and, particularly, with reference to thesectional issue and the issue of tariff reform--I might, if I wanted to beunamiable, suggest to you a more attentive perusal of the proceedings ofthe three national conventions which nominated you for President.

But I purpose nothing of the sort. In the last five national conventions myefforts were decisive in framing the platform of the party. In each of themI closed the debate, moved the previous question and was sustained by theconvention. In all of them, except the last, I was a maker, not a smasher.Touching what happened at Chicago, the present year, I had a right, incommon with good Democrats, to be anxious; and out of that sense of anxietyalone I wrote you. I am sorry that my temerity was deemed by you intrusiveand, entering a respectful protest against a ban which I cannot believe tobe deserved by me, and assuring you that I shall not again trouble you inthat way, I am, your obedient servant,

HENRY WATTERSON.

The Hon. Grover Cleveland.

V

This ended my personal relations with Mr. Cleveland. Thereafter we did notspeak as we passed by. He was a hard man to get on with. Overcredulous,though by no means excessive, in his likes, very tenacious in his dislikes,suspicious withal, he grew during his second term in the White House,exceedingly "high and mighty," suggesting somewhat the "stuffed prophet,"of Mr. Dana's relentless lambasting and verifying my insistence that heposed rather as an idol to be worshiped, than a leader to be trusted andloved. He was in truth a strong man, who, sufficiently mindful of hislimitations in the beginning, grew by unexampled and continued successoverconfident and overconscious in his own conceit. He had a real desire toserve the country. But he was apt to think that he alone could effectivelyserve it. In one of our spats I remember saying to him, "You seem, Mr.President, to think you are the only pebble on the beach--the one honestand brave man in the party--hut let me assure you of my own knowledge thatthere are others." His answer was, "Oh, you go to ----!"

He split his party wide open. The ostensible cause was the money issue.But, underlying this, there was a deal of personal embitterment. Had hebeen a man of foresight--or even of ordinary discernment--he might haveheld it together and with it behind him have carried the gold standard.

I had contended for a sound currency from the outset of the fiscalcontention, fighting first the green-back craze and then the free silvercraze against an overwhelming majority in the West and South, nowhere moreradically relentless than in Kentucky. Both movements had their origin oneconomic fallacies and found their backing in dishonest purpose to escapehonest indebtedness.

Through Mr. Cleveland the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Tilden wasconverted from a Democrat into a Populist, falling into the arms of Mr.Bryan, whose domination proved as baleful in one way as Mr. Cleveland's hadbeen in another, the final result shipwreck, with the extinguishment of allbut the label.

Mr. Bryan was a young man of notable gifts of speech and boundlessself-assertion. When he found himself well in the saddle he began to ruledespotically and to ride furiously. A party leader more short-sighted couldhardly be imagined. None of his judgments came true. As a consequence theRepublicans for a long time had everything their own way, and, save forthe Taft-Roosevelt quarrel, might have held their power indefinitely. Allhistory tells us that the personal equation must be reckoned with inpublic life. Assuredly it cuts no mean figure in human affairs. And, whenpoliticians fall out--well--the other side comes in.

Chapter the Twenty-First

Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"

I have received many letters touching what I said a little while ago ofStephen Collins Foster, the song writer. In that matter I had, and couldhave had, no unkindly thought or purpose. The story of the musicalscrapbook rested not with me, but as I stated, upon the averment of Will S.Hays, a rival song writer. But that the melody of Old Folks at Home may befound in Schubert's posthumous Rosemonde admits not of contradiction forthere it is, and this would seem to be in some sort corroborative evidenceof the truth of Hays' story.

Among these letters comes one from Young E. Allison which is entitled toserious consideration. Mr. Allison is a gentleman of the first order ofcharacter and culture, an editor and a musician, and what he writes cannotfail to carry with it very great weight. I need make no apology for quotinghim at length.

"I have long been collecting material about Foster from his birth to hisdeath," says Mr. Allison, "and aside from his weak and fatal love of drink,which developed after he was twenty-five, and had married, his life was onecontinuous devotion to the study of music, of painting, of poetry and oflanguages; in point of fact, of all the arts that appeal to one who feelswithin him the stir of the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, afine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him in the study of music as ascience, to which time and balance play such an important part. In fact, Ibelieve it was the mathematical devil in his brain that came to hold himwithin such bare and primitive forms of composition and so, to some extent,to delimit the wider development of his genius.

"Now as to Foster's drinking habits, however unfortunate they proved to himthey did not affect the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us.No one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, De Musset, Chopinor--even in our own time--of O. Henry, and others who might be named. Innone of their productions does the hectic fever of over-stimulation showitself. No purer, gentler or simpler aspirations were ever expressed in thevarying forms of music and verse than flowed from Foster's pen, even aspenetrating benevolence came from the pen of O. Henry, embittered andsolitary as his life had been. Indeed when we come to regard what thedrinkers of history have done for the world in spite of the artificialstimulus they craved, we may say with Lincoln as Lincoln said of Grant,'Send the other generals some of the same brand.'

"Foster was an aristocrat of aristocrats, both by birth and gifts. Heinherited the blood of Richard Steele and of the Kemble family, noted inEnglish letters and dramatic annals. To these artistic strains headded undoubtedly the musical temperament of an Italian grandmother orgreat-grand-mother. He was a cousin of John Rowan, the distinguishedKentucky lawyer and senator. Of Foster's family, his father, his brothers,his sisters were all notable as patriots, as pioneers in engineering, incommerce and in society. One of his brothers designed and built the earlyPennsylvania Railroad system and died executive vice-president of thatgreat corporation. Thus he was born to the arts and to social distinction.But, like many men of the creative temperament, he was born a solitary,destined to live in a land of dreams. The singular beauty and grace of hisperson and countenance, the charm of his voice, manner and conversation,were for the most part familiar to the limited circle of his immediatefamily and friends. To others he was reticent, with a certain hauteur oftimidity, avoiding society and public appearances to the day of his death.

"Now those are the facts about Foster. They certainly do not describe the'ne'er-do-well of a good family' who hung round barrooms, colored-minstrelhaunts and theater entrances. I can find only one incident to show thatFoster ever went to hear his own songs sung in public. He was essentially asolitary, who, while keenly observant of and entering sympathizingly intothe facts of life, held himself aloof from immediate contact with itscrowded stream. He was solitary from sensitivity, not from bitterness orindifference. He made a large fortune for his day with his songs and was apopular idol.

"Let us come now to the gravamen of my complaint. You charge on theauthority of mere gossip from the late Will S. Hays, that Foster did notcompose his own music, but that he had obtained a collection of unpublishedmanuscripts by an unnamed old 'German musician and thus dishonestly,by pilfering and suppression' palmed off upon the public themes andcompositions which he could not himself have originated. Something likethis has been said about every composer and writer, big and little, whosepersonality and habits did not impress his immediate neighbors as implyingthe possession of genius. The world usually expects direct inheritance anda theatric impressiveness of genius in its next-door neighbor before itaccepts the proof of his works alone. For that reason Napoleon's paternityin Corsica was ascribed to General Maboeuf, and Henry Clay's in earlyKentucky to Patrick Henry. That legend of the 'poor, unknown Germanmusician' who composed in poverty and secrecy the deathless songs thathave obsessed the world of music lovers, has been told of numberless youngcomposers on their way to fame, but died out in the blaze of their laterwork. I have no doubt they told it of Foster, as they did also of Hays.And Colonel Hays doubtless repeated it to you as the intimate gossip aboutFoster.

"I have an article written by Colonel Hays and published in and cut fromThe Courier-Journal some twelve years after the composer's death, in whichhe sketches the life and work of Stephen Collins Foster. In that article helays especial stress upon the surprising originality of the Foster themesand of their musical setting. He praises their distinct American or rathernative inspiration and flavor, and describes from his own knowledge ofFoster how they were 'written from his heart.' No mention or suggestion init of any German or other origin for any of those melodies that the worldthen and now cherishes as American in costume, but universal in appeal.While you may have heard something in Schubert's compositions thatsuggested something in Foster's most famous song, still I venture to say itwas only a suggestion, such as often arises from the works of composers ofthe same general type. Schubert and Foster were both young sentimentalistsand dreamers who must have had similar dreams that found expression intheir similar progressions.

"The German musicians from whom Foster got inspiration to work wereBeethoven, Glueck, Weber, Mozart. He was a student of all of them and of theItalian school also, as some of his songs show. Foster's first and onlymusic teacher--except in the 'do-re-mi' exercises in his schoolboylife--testifies that Foster's musical apprehension was so quick, hisintuitive grasp of its science so complete that after a short time therewas nothing he could teach him of the theory of composition; that hispupil went straight to the masters and got illustration and discipline forhimself.

"This was to be expected of a precocious genius who had written a concertedpiece for flutes at thirteen, who was trying his wings on love songs atsixteen, and before he was twenty-one had composed several of the mostfamous of his American melodies, among them Oh Susannah, Old Dog Tray andOld Uncle Ned. As in other things he taught himself music, but he studiedit ardently at the shrines of the masters. He became a master of the art ofsong writing. If anybody cares to hunt up the piano scores that Verdi madeof songs from his operas in the days of Foster he will find that the greatItalian composer's settings were quite as thin as Foster's and exhibitednot much greater art. It was the fault of the times on the piano, not ofthe composers. It was not till long afterward that the color capacitiesof the piano were developed. As Foster was no pianist, but rather a puremelodist, he could not be expected to surpass his times in the managementof the piano, the only 'orchestra' he had. It will not do to regard Fosteras a crude musician. His own scores reveal him as the most artful of'artless' composers.

"It is not even presumption to speak of him in the same breath with Verdi.The breadth and poignancy of Foster's melodies entitle them to the highestcritical respect, as they have received worldwide appreciation from greatmusicians and plain music lovers. Wherever he has gone he has reached thepopular heart. Here in the United States he has quickened the pulse beatsof four generations. But this master creator of a country's only nativesongs has invariably here at home been apologized for as a sort of'cornfield musician,' a mere banjo strummer, a hanger-on at barrooms whereminstrel quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. The reflectionwill react upon his country; it will not detract from the real Foster whenthe constructive critic appears to write his brief and unfortunate life. Iam not contending that he was a genius of the highest rank, although he hadthe distinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of creating aschool that produced many imitators and established a place apart foritself in the world's estimation. In ballad writing he did for the UnitedStates what Watteau did for painting in France. As Watteau found a Flemishschool in France and left a French school stamped forever, so Foster foundthe United States a home for imitations of English, Irish, German andItalian songs, and left a native ballad form and melodic strain foreverimpressed upon it as pure American.

"He was like Watteau in more than that. Watteau took the elegancies andfripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, asif the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster tookthe curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height,superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners thiscountry has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. Hesaw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotionaldepths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time,for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the pictorialcanvas of that time, they are the emotional history of the times. It wasdone by a boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the end, or philosopherenough to demonstrate the conditions, but who was born with the intuitionto feel it all and set it forth deeply and truly from every aspect.

"While Foster wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something ofthe melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces andarabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form wasextremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely thatit seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated tofurnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared withthe modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside aMichelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in its scope as the statueis in the greater.

"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward.'"

All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am tryingin Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps Ishould speak only of that which is known directly to myself. It costs menothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as anessential part of the record as far as it relates to the most famous and inhis day the most beloved of American song writers.

Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated togetheron the platform when the band began to play Marching Through Georgia, whenthe general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every timeI have had to listen to that blasted tune."

And I answered: "Well, there is another tune about which I might say thesame thing," meaning My Old Kentucky Home.

Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hearthe familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some Americanfriends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking forthwith the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was mightilypleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a potpourri ofSwiss songs, interpolated Kentucky's national anthem and the group of usstood up and sang the chorus.

I do not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum andfife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a longway to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds theheart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs ofAmerica the name of Stephen Collins Foster "is immortal bound," and I wouldno more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the author of TheStar-Spangled Banner.

It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write--truthfully,intelligently and frankly to write--about Theodore Roosevelt. He belongedto the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat, he at notime took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a bornleader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy.To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him andrarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faultscommended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quitedeserted him.

As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-manpower, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in thepresidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many ofits leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and helpedto kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third term.Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt beyondthe time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was primedagainst it and I wrote variously and voluminously.

There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch ofmine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White Housewould have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how atWashington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal--the nieceof a Southern senator--who had studied in Paris, been a protegee of theEmpress Eugenie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon washer ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but accepted as gospeltruth all the misleading theories of the South: that cotton was king; thatslavery was a divine institution; that in any enterprise one Southern manwas a match for six Northern men.

On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she wentSouth with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in alumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag.

Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her from time to time wanderingaimlessly over Europe, but had not met her until the preceding winter in afamous Southern homestead. There she led me into a rose garden, and seatedbeneath its clustered greeneries she said with an air of triumph, "Now yousee, my dear old friend, that I was right and you were wrong all the time."

Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in what way.

"Why," she answered, "at last the South is coming to its own."

Still out of rapport with her thought I said something about theobliteration of sectionalism and the arrival of political freedom andgeneral prosperity. She would none of this.

[Illustration: Henry Watterson (Photograph taken in Florida)]

"I mean," she abruptly interposed, "that the son of Martha Bullock has cometo his own and he will rescue us from the mudsills of the North."

She spoke as if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I gaveher the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give emphasis toher theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her so simple andeasy; God's own will; the national destiny, first a third term, and thenlife tenure a la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt, the son of MarthaBullock, the nephew of our great admiral, who was to redress all the wrongsof the South and bring the Yankees to their just deserts at last.

"If," I ended my sketch, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, why notout of the brain of this crazed old woman of the South?"

Early in the following April I came from my winter home in Florida to thenational capital, and the next day was called by the President to the WhiteHouse.

"The first thing I want to ask," said he, "is whether that old woman was areal person or a figment of your imagination?"

"She was a figment of my imagination," I answered, "but you put her out ofbusiness with a single punch. Why didn't you hold back your statement abit? If you had done so there was room for lots of sport ahead."

He was in no mood for joking. "Henry Watterson," he said, "I want to talkto you seriously about this third-term business. I will not deny that Ihave thought of the thing--thought of it a great deal." Then he proceededto relate from his point of view the state of the country and the immediatesituation. He spoke without reserve of his relations to the nearestassociated public men, of what were and what were not his personal andparty obligations, his attitude toward the political questions of themoment, and ended by saying, "What do you make of all this?"

"Mr. President," I replied, "you know that I am your friend, and as yourfriend I tell you that if you go out of here the fourth of next Marchplacing your friend Taft in your place you will make a good third toWashington and Lincoln; but if you allow these wild fellows willy-nillyto induce you, in spite of your declaration, to accept the nomination,substantially for a third term, all issues will be merged in that issue,and in my judgment you will not carry a state in the Union."

As if much impressed and with a show of feeling he said: "It may be so. Atany rate I will not do it. If the convention nominates me I will promptlysend my declination. If it nominates me and adjourns I will call ittogether again and it will have to name somebody else."

As an illustration of the implacability which pursued him I may mentionthat among many leading Republicans to whom I related the incident mostof them discredited his sincerity, one of them--a man of nationalimportance--expressing the opinion that all along he was artfully playingfor the nomination. This I do not believe. Perhaps he was never quite fixedin his mind. The presidency is a wondrous lure. Once out of the WhiteHouse--what else and what----?

II

Upon his return from one of his several foreign journeys a party of somehundred or more of his immediate personal friends gave him a private dinnerat a famous uptown restaurant. I was placed next him at table. It goeswithout saying that we had all sorts of a good time--he Caesar and IBrutus--the prevailing joke the entente between the two.

"I think," he began his very happy speech, "that I am the bravest manthat ever lived, for here I have been sitting three hours by the side ofBrutus--have repeatedly seen him clutch his knife--without the blink of aneye or the turn of a feature."

To which in response when my turn came I said: "You gentlemen seem to besurprised that there should be so perfect an understanding between ourguest and myself. But there is nothing new or strange in that. It goesback, indeed, to his cradle and has never been disturbed throughout theintervening years of political discussion--sometimes acrimonious. At thetop of the acclivity of his amazing career--in the very plenitude of hiseminence and power--let me tell you that he offered me one of the mosthonorable and distinguished appointments within his gift."

"Tell them about that, Marse Henry," said he.

"With your permission, Mr. President, I will," I said, and continued: "Thecentenary of the West Point Military Academy was approaching. I was atdinner with my family at a hotel in Washington when General Corbin joinedus. 'Will you,' he abruptly interjected, 'accept the chairmanship of theboard of visitors to the academy this coming June?'

"'What do you want of me?' I asked.

"'It is the academy's centenary, which we propose to celebrate, and we wantan orator.'

"'General Corbin,' said I, 'you are coming at me in a most enticing way.I know all about West Point. Here at Washington I grew up with it. I havebeen fighting legislative battles for the Army all my life. That youYankees should come to a ragged old rebel like me for such a service is adistinction indeed, and I feel immensely honored. But which page of thecourt calendar made you a plural? Whom do you mean by "we"?'

"I promised him to think it over and give him an answer. Next day Ireceived a letter from the President, making the formal official tender andexpressing the hope that I would not decline it. Yet how could I accept itwith the work ahead of me? It was certain that if I became a part of thepresidential junket and passed a week in the delightful company promisedme, I would be unfit for the loyal duty I owed my belongings and my party,and so reluctantly--more reluctantly than I can tell you--I declined,obliging them to send for Gen. Horace Porter and bring him over from acrossthe ocean, where he was ably serving as Ambassador to France. I neednot add how well that gifted and versatile gentleman discharged thedistinguished and pleasing duty."

III

The last time I met Theodore Roosevelt was but a little while before hisdeath. A small party of us, Editor Moore, of Pittsburgh, and Mr. Riggs,of the New York Central, at his invitation had a jolly midday breakfast,extending far into the afternoon. I never knew him happier or heartier.His jocund spirit rarely failed him. He enjoyed life and wasted no time ontrivial worries, hit-or-miss, the keynote to his thought.

The Dutch blood of Holland and the cavalier blood of England mingled inhis veins in fair proportion. He was especially proud of the uncle, hismother's brother, the Southern admiral, head of the Confederate navalorganization in Europe, who had fitted out the rebel cruisers and sent themto sea. And well he might be, for a nobler American never lived. At theclose of the War of Sections Admiral Bullock had in his possession somehalf million dollars of Confederate money. Instead of appropriating this tohis own use, as without remark or hindrance he might have done, he turnedit over to the Government of the United States, and died a poor man.

The inconsistencies and quarrels in which Theodore Roosevelt was now andagain involved were largely temperamental. His mind was of that order whichis prone to believe what it wants to believe. He did not take much time tothink. He leaped at conclusions, and from his premise his conclusion wasusually sound. His tastes were domestic, his pastime, when not at hisbooks, field sports.

He was not what might be called convivial, though fond of goodcompany--very little wine affecting him--so that a certain self-controlbecame second nature to him.

To be sure, he had no conscientious or doctrinal scruples about a thirdterm. He had found the White House a congenial abode, had accepted theliteral theory that his election in 1908 would not imply a third but asecond term, and he wanted to remain. In point of fact I have an impressionthat, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got there were loathto give it up. We know that Grant was, and I am sure that Cleveland was. Weowe a great debt to Washington, because if a third why not a fourth term?And then life tenure after the manner of the Caesars and Cromwells ofhistory, and especially the Latin-Americans--Bolivar, Rosas and Diaz?

Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine took me into his den and toldme that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about GeneralGrant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority, wasmaneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible.Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of SenatorMorton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to enter.Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him."Certainly," he said, "it is true."

The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I hadheard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added aclosing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that Ihad not gone quite daft.

"These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country. Theymay have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to me betwixtthe sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that they arebuzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not unimportantpersons."

Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I, never asimple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican newspapersvied with one another which could say crossest things and laugh loudest.One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, andit was many a year before the phrase "between the sherry and the champagne"ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic American, twice elevated to thepresidency, could want a third term, could have the hardihood to seek onewas inconceivable. My letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of myown lack of intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, goodand strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encounteredthe same criticism.

Chapter the Twenty-Third

The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and Religious Belief

I

The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each turns nightinto day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent English-speakingactors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham to Edwin Booth andJoseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to Helena Modjeska. No people arequite so interesting as stage people.

During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ranclose upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but afterthe desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together undercircumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and establishedbetween us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died, andhe was passing through Washington with the little brood of children she hadleft him.

It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after morethan sixty years, the scene of silent grief, of unutterable helplessness,has still a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not eight years of age,the youngest a girl baby in arms, the young father aghast before the suddentragedy which had come upon him. There must have been something in mysympathy which drew him toward me, for on his return a few months laterhe sought me out and we fell into the easy intercourse of establishedrelations.

I was recovering from an illness, and every day he would come and read bymy bedside. I had not then lost the action of one of my hands, putting anend to a course of musical study I had hoped to develop into a career. Hewas infinitely fond of music and sufficiently familiar with the old mastersto understand and enjoy them. He was an artist through and through,possessing a sweet nor yet an uncultivated voice--a blend between a lowtenor and a high baritone--I was almost about to write a "contralto," itwas so soft and liquid. Its tones in speech retained to the last theircharm. Who that heard them shall ever forget them?

Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me and said: "There is going tobe a war of the sections. I am not a warrior. I am neither a Northernernor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to engage in bloodshed, or to takesides. I have near and dear ones North and South. I am going away and Ishall stay away until the storm blows over. It may seem to you unpatriotic,and it is, I know, unheroic. I am not a hero; I am, I hope, an artist. Myworld is the world of art, and I must be true to that; it is my patriotism,my religion. I can do no manner of good here, and I am going away."

II

At that moment statesmen were hopefully estimating the chances of apeaceful adjustment and solution of the sectional controversy. With theprophet instinct of the artist he knew better. Though at no time taking anactive interest in politics or giving expression to party bias of any kind,his personal associations led him into a familiar knowledge of the trend ofpolitical opinion and the portent of public affairs, and I can truly saythat during the fifty years that passed thereafter I never discussed anytopic of current interest or moment with him that he did not throw uponit the side lights of a luminous understanding, and at the same time animpartial and intelligent judgment.

His mind was both reflective and radiating. His humor though perennial wassubdued; his wit keen and spontaneous, never acrid or wounding. His speechabounded with unconscious epigram. He had his beliefs and stood by them;but he was never aggressive. Cleaner speech never fell from the lips ofman. I never heard him use a profanity. We once agreed between ourselves todraw a line across the salacious stories so much in vogue during our day;the wit must exceed the dirt; where the dirt exceeded the wit we would noneof it.

He was a singularly self-respecting man; genuinely a modest man. Theactor is supposed to be so familiar with the pubic as to be proof againstsurprises. Before his audience he must be master of himself, holding thesituation and his art by the firmest grip. He must simulate, not experienceemotion, the effect referable to the seeming, never to the actualityinvolving the realization.

Mr. Jefferson held to this doctrine and applied it rigorously. On a certainoccasion he was playing Caleb Plummer. In the scene between the oldtoy-maker and his blind daughter, when the father discovers the dreadfulresult of his dissimulation--an awkward hitch; and, the climax quitethwarted, the curtain came down. I was standing at the wings.

"Did you see that?" he said as he brushed by me, going to hisdressing-room.

"No," said I, following him. "What was it?"

He turned, his eyes still wet and his voice choked. "I broke down," saidhe; "completely broke down. I turned away from the audience to recovermyself. But I failed and had the curtain rung."

The scene had been spoiled because the actor had been overcome by a suddenflood of real feeling, whereas he was to render by his art the feeling ofa fictitious character and so to communicate this to his audience. Caleb'scue was tears, but not Jefferson's.

On another occasion I saw his self-possession tried in a different way. Wewere dining with a gentleman who had overpartaken of his own hospitality.Mr. Murat Halstead was of the company. There was also a German ofdistinction, whose knowledge of English was limited. The Rip Van Winklecraze was at its height. After sufficiently impressing the German with therare opportunity he was having in meeting a man so famous as Mr. Jefferson,our host, encouraged by Mr. Halstead, and I am afraid not discouraged byme, began to urge Mr. Jefferson to give us, as he said, "a touch of hismettle," and failing to draw the great comedian out he undertook himself togive a few descriptive passages from the drama which was carrying thetown by storm. Poor Jefferson! He sat like an awkward boy, helpless andblushing, the German wholly unconscious of the fun or even comprehendingjust what was happening--Halstead and I maliciously, mercilessly enjoyingit.

III

I never heard Mr. Jefferson make a recitation or, except in the singing ofa song before his voice began to break, make himself a part of any privateentertainment other than that of a spectator and guest.

He shrank from personal displays of every sort. Even in his younger days herarely "gagged," or interpolated, upon the stage. Yet he did not lack fora ready wit. One time during the final act of Rip Van Winkle, a youngcountryman in the gallery was so carried away that he quite lost hisbearings and seemed to be about to climb over the outer railing. Theaudience, spellbound by the actor, nevertheless saw the rustic, and itsattention was being divided between the two when Jefferson reached thatpoint in the action of the piece where Rip is amazed by the docility of hiswife under the ill usage of her second husband. He took in the situation ata glance.

Casting his eye directly upon the youth in the gallery, he uttered thelines as if addressing them directly to him, "Well, I would never havebelieved it if I had not seen it."

The poor fellow, startled, drew back from his perilous position, and theaudience broke into a storm of applause.

Joseph Jefferson was a Swedenborgian in his religious belief. At onetime too extreme a belief in spiritualism threatened to cloud his sound,wholesome understanding. As he grew older and happier and passed outfrom the shadow of his early tragedy he fell away from the more sinisterinfluence the supernatural had attained over his imagination. One time inWashington I had him to breakfast to meet the Chief Justice and Mr. JusticeMatthews and Mr. Carlisle, the newly-elected Speaker of the House. It was arainy Sunday, and it was in my mind to warn him that our company was madeup of hard-headed lawyers not apt to be impressed by fairy tales andghost stories, and to suggest that he cut the spiritualism in case theconversation fell, as was likely, into the speculative. I forgot, orsomething hindered, and, sure enough, the question of second sight and mindreading came up, and I said to myself: "Lord, now we'll have it." But itwas my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, who led off with a clairvoyant experiencein his law practice. I began to be reassured. Mr. Carlisle followed with amost mathematical account of some hobgoblins he had encountered in hislaw practice. Finally the Chief Justice, Mr. Waite, related a series ofincidents so fantastic and incredible, yet detailed with the precision andlucidity of a master of plain statement, as fairly to stagger the mostbelieving ghostseer. Then I said to myself again: "Let her go, Joe, nomatter what you tell now you will fall below the standard set by theseprofessional perfecters of pure reason, and are safe to do your best, oryour worst." I think he held his own, however.

IV

Joseph Jefferson came to his artistic spurs slowly but surely, being nearlythirty years of age when he got his chance, and therefore wholly equal toit and prepared for it.

William E. Burton stood and had stood for twenty-five years the recognized,the reigning king of comedy in America. He was a master of his craft aswell as a leader in society and letters. To look at him when he cameupon the stage was to laugh; yet he commanded tears almost as readily aslaughter. In New York City particularly he ruled the roost, and could anddid do that which had cost another his place. He began to take too manyliberties with the public favor and, truth to say, was beginning to be bothcoarse and careless. People were growing restive under ministrations whichwere at times little less than impositions upon their forbearance. Theywanted something if possible as strong, but more refined, and in the personof the leading comedy man of Laura Keene's company, a young actor by thename of Jefferson, they got it.

Both Mr. Sothern and Mr. Jefferson have told the story of Tom Taylor'sextravaganza, "Our American Cousin," in which the one as Dundreary, theother as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant popularity and fame. I shallnot repeat it except to say that Jefferson's Asa Trenchard was unlike anyother the English or American stage has known. He played the raw Yankeeboy, not in low comedy at all, but made him innocent and ignorant as awell-born Green Mountain lad might be, never a bumpkin; and in the scenewhen Asa tells his sweetheart the bear story and whilst pretending to lighthis cigar burns the will, he left not a dry eye in the house.

New York had never witnessed, never divined anything in pathos and humorso exquisite. Burton and his friends struggled for a season, but Jeffersoncompletely knocked them out. Even had Burton lived, and had there been nodiverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson would have come tohis growth and taken his place as the first serio-comic actor of his time.

Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson's half-brother, Charles Burke,had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in it, wasplaying in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson turned himselfloose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous burlesque,which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of the feminine horsemarines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah IsaacsMenken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head. Then he produceda version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a moreambitious flight. These, however, were but the avant-couriers of theimmortal Rip.

Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of Irving's legend. When thevagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep Gretchenis dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed at a table infront of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after Derrick VanBeekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At last, half twinkle ofhumor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself to the point of askingafter Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she has been dead these ten years.Then like a flash came that wonderful Jeffersonian change of facialexpression, and as the white head drops upon the arms stretched before himon the table he says: "Well, she led me a hard life, a hard life, but shewas the wife of my bosom, she was _meine frau!_"

I did not see the revised, or rather the newly-created and written, RipVan Winkle until Mr. Jefferson brought it to America and was playing it atNiblo's Garden in New York. Between himself and Dion Boucicault a dramacarrying all the possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his geniushad been constructed. In the first act he sang a drinking song to a wingaccompaniment delightfully, adding much to the tone and color of thesituation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last act was aninspiration, his own and not Boucicault's. The weird scene in the mountainsfell in admirably with a certain weird note in the Jefferson genius, andsupplied the needed element of variety.

I always thought it a good acting play under any circumstances, but, inhis hands, matchless. He thought himself that the piece, as a piece, andregardless of his own acting, deserved better of the critics than they werealways willing to give it. Assuredly, no drama that ever was written, as heplayed it, ever took such a hold upon the public. He rendered it to threegenerations, and to a rising, not a falling, popularity, drawing to thevery last undiminished audiences.

Because of this unexampled run he was sometimes described by unthinkingpeople as a one-part actor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Hepossessed uncommon versatility. That after twenty years of the new Rip VanWinkle, when he was past fifty years of age, he could come back to suchparts as Caleb Plummer and Acres is proof of this. He need not have done soat all. Carrying a pension roll of dependents aggregating fifteen or twentythousand a year for more than a quarter of a century, Rip would still havesufficed his requirements. It was his love for his art that took him to TheCricket and The Rivals, and at no inconsiderable cost to himself.

I have heard ill-natured persons, some of them envious actors, say that hedid nothing for the stage.

He certainly did not make many contributions to its upholstery. He was inno position to emulate Sir Henry Irving in forcing and directing the publictaste. But he did in America quite as much as Sir Charles Wyndham andSir Henry Irving in England to elevate the personality, the social andintellectual standing of the actor and the stage, effecting in a lifetime arevolution in the attitude of the people and the clergy of both countriesto the theater and all things in it. This was surely enough for one man inany craft or country.

He was always a good stage speaker. Late in life he began to speakelsewhere, and finally to lecture. His success pleased him immensely. Thenight of the Sunday afternoon charity for the Newsboys' Home in Louisville,when the promise of a talk from him had filled the house to overflowing,he was like a boy who had come off from a college occasion with all thehonors. Indeed, the degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had reached him bothunexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a pleasure quite apart from thevanity they might have gratified in another; he regarded them, and justly,as the recognition at once of his profession and of his personal character.

I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities were more acute. He loved therespectable. He detested the unclean. He was just as attractive off thestage as upon it, because he was as unaffected and real in his personalityas he was sincere and conscientious in his public representations, hislovely nature showing through his art in spite of him. His purpose was tofill the scene and forget himself.

V

The English newspapers accompanied the tidings of Mr. Jefferson's deathwith rather sparing estimates of his eminence and his genius, though hissuccess in London, where he was well known, had been unequivocal. Indeed,himself, alone with Edwin Booth and Mary Anderson, may be said to completethe list of those Americans who have attained any real recognition in theBritish metropolis. The Times spoke of him as "an able if not a greatactor." If Joseph Jefferson was not a great actor I should like somecompetent person to tell me what actor of our time could be so described.

Two or three of the journals of Paris referred to him as "the AmericanCoquelin." It had been apter to describe Coquelin as the French Jefferson.I never saw Frederic Lemaitre. But, him apart, I have seen all theeccentric comedians, the character actors of the last fifty years, and, inspell power, in precision and deftness of touch, in acute, penetrating,all-embracing and all-embodying intelligence and grasp, I should placeJoseph Jefferson easily at their head.

Shakespeare was his Bible. The stage had been his cradle. He continued allhis days a student. In him met the meditative and the observing faculties.In his love of fishing, his love of painting, his love of music we see thebrooding, contemplative spirit joined to the alert in mental force andforesight when he addressed himself to the activities and the objectivesof the theater. He was a thorough stage manager, skillful, patient andupright. His company was his family. He was not gentler with the childrenand grandchildren he ultimately drew about him than he had been with theyoung men and young women who had preceded them in his employment andinstruction.

He was nowise ashamed of his calling. On the contrary, he was proud of it.His mother had lived and died an actress. He preferred that his progenyshould follow in the footsteps of their forebears even as he had done.It is beside the purpose to inquire, as was often done, what might havehappened had he undertaken the highest flights of tragedy; one might aswell discuss the relation of a Dickens to a Shakespeare. Sir HenryIrving and Sir Charles Wyndham in England, M. Coquelin in France, hiscontemporaries--each had his _metier_. They were perfect in their artand unalike in their art. No comparison between them can be justly drawn.I was witness to the rise of all three of them, and have followed themin their greatest parts throughout their most brilliant and eminent andsuccessful careers, and can say of each as of Mr. Jefferson:

_More than King can no man be--Whether he rule in Cyprus or in Dreams._

There shall be Kings of Thule after kings are gone. The actor dies andleaves no copy; his deeds are writ in water, only his name survives upontradition's tongue, and yet, from Betterton and Garrick to Irving, fromMacklin and Quin to Wyndham and Jefferson, how few!

Chapter the Twenty-Fourth

The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps

I

Talleyrand was so impressed by the world-compelling character of thememoirs he had prepared for posterity that he fixed an interdict of morethan fifty years upon the date set for their publication, and when atlast the bulky tomes made their appearance, they excited no especialinterest--certainly created no sensation--and lie for the most part dustyupon the shelves of the libraries that contain them. For a differentreason, Henry Ward Beecher put a time limit upon the volume, or volumes,which will tell us, among other things, all about one of the greatestscandals of modern times; and yet how few people now recall it or careanything about the dramatis personae and the actual facts! Metternich, nextafter Napoleon and Talleyrand, was an important figure in a stirring epoch.He, too, indicted an autobiography, which is equally neglected among thebooks that are sometimes quoted and extolled, but rarely read. Rousseau,the half insane, and Barras, the wholly vicious, have twenty readers whereTalleyrand and Metternich have one.

From this point of view, the writing of memoirs, excepting those of thetrivial French School or gossiping letters and diaries of the Pepys-Walpolevariety, would seem an unprofitable task for a great man's undertaking.Boswell certainly did for Johnson what the thunderous old doctor could nothave done for himself. Nevertheless, from the days of Caesar to the daysof Sherman and Lee, the captains of military and senatorial and literaryindustry have regaled themselves, if they have not edified the public, bythe narration of their own stories; and, I dare say, to the end of time,interest in one's self, and the mortal desire to linger yet a little longeron the scene--now and again, as in the case of General Grant, the assuranceof honorable remuneration making needful provision for others--will movethose who have cut some figure in the world to follow the wandering Celt inthe wistful hope--

_Around my fire an evening group to draw, And tell of all I felt and all I saw._

Something like this occurs to me upon a reperusal of the unfinished memoirsof my old and dear friend, Carl Schurz. Assuredly few men had betterwarrant for writing about themselves or a livelier tale to tell than thefamous German-American, who died leaving that tale unfinished. No man inlife was more misunderstood and maligned. There was nothing either erraticor conceited about Schurz, nor was he more pragmatic than is common tothe possessor of positive opinions along with the power to make theirexpression effectual.

The actual facts of his public life do not anywhere show that his politicsshifted with his own interests. On the contrary, he was singularlyregardless of his interests where his convictions interposed. Though analien, and always an alien, he possessed none of the shifty traits of thesoldier of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the pregnant hinges ofthe knee before any worldly throne of grace or flatter any mob that placemight follow fawning. His great talents had only to lend themselves toparty uses to get their full requital. He refused them equally to Grant inthe White House and the multitude in Missouri, going his own gait, whichcould be called erratic only by the conventional, to whom regularity iseverything and individuality nothing.

Schurz was first of all and above all an orator. His achievements on theplatform and in the Senate were undeniable. He was unsurpassed in debate.He had no need to exploit himself. The single chapter in his life on whichlight was desirable was the military episode. The cruel and false saying,"I fight mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz," obviously the offspring ofmalignity, did mislead many people, reenforced by the knowledge that Schurzwas not an educated soldier. How thoroughly he disposes of this calumny hismemoirs attest. Fuller, more convincing vindication could not be asked ofany man; albeit by those familiar with the man himself it could not bedoubted that he had both courage and aptitude for military employment.

II

A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the vortexof affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have livedand died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his musicalstudies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. Asit was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel,the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and Londonawakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure.

There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and tooaccomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which henever departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims hewas a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in temperamentand disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself.

He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and takeon so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the anti-slaverymovement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea carried him quicklyfrom one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which found him in theSenate of the United States, revealed to his startled senses the creeping,crawling things beneath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous andcorrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White House; a Blaine, a Butler and aGarfield leading the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading theSenate; single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction,nowhere.

Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme ofreconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The revenueservice was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were packed withmercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the order of the day.Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure and of blood hadbeen poured out? Was it for this that he had fought with tongue and pen andsword?

There was Sumner--the great Sumner--who had quarreled with Grant and Fish,to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune, the puissantTribune--two of them, one in New York and the other in Chicago--to givehim countenance. There was need of liberalizing and loosening things inMissouri, for which he sat in the Senate--they could not go on forever halfthe best elements in the State disfranchised.

Thus the Liberal Movement of 1872.

Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist--not quiteyet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles--the firstnewspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried byRaymond and Forney--a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile ofresources, and not afraid--stood foremost among them. Next came HoraceWhite. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer eyeas cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity, aworking journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A little group of such menformed itself about Schurz--then only forty-three years old--to what end?Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of abolitionism, the king beeof protectionism, the man of fads and isms and the famous "old white hat."

To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it was tragical. A bridge had tobe constructed for him to pass--for retrace his steps he could not--and,as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed upon this like a mule aboarda train of cars. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Schurz hadthen and there resigned his seat in the Senate, got his brood together andreturned to Germany. I dare say he would have been welcomed by Bismarck.

Certainly there was no lodgment for him thenceforward in American politics.The exigencies of 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the HayesAdministration; but, precisely as the Democrats of Missouri could put sucha man to no use, the Republicans at large could find no use for him. Heseemed a bull in a china shop to the political organization he honored witha preference wholly intellectual, and having no stomach for either extreme,he became a Mugwump.

III

He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had becomea philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his environment.He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest truthfulness andgenuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor ceased to regard himwith the enduring affection one might have for an ardent, aspiring andlovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could not and perhaps didnot desire to understand him.... To him the Southerners were always thered-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he had fancied and pictured them inthe days of his abolition oratory. More and more he lived in a rut of hisown fancies, wise in books and counsels, gentle in his relations with thefew who enjoyed his confidence; to the last a most captivating personality.

Though fastidious, Schurz was not intolerant. Yet he was hard toconvince--tenacious of his opinions--courteous but insistent in debate. Hewas a German; a German Herr Doktor of Music, of Letters and of Common Law.During an intimacy of more than thirty years we scarcely ever wholly agreedabout any public matter; differing about even the civil service and thetariff. But I admired him hugely and loved him heartily.

I had once a rather amusing encounter with him. There was a dinner atDelmonico's, from whose program of post-prandial oratory I had purposelycaused my own name to be omitted. Indeed, I had had with a lady a wager Ivery much wished to win that I would not speak. General Grant and I went intogether, and during the repast he said that the only five human beings inthe world whom he detested were actually here at table.

Of course, Schurz was one of these. He was the last on the list of speakersand, curiously enough--the occasion being the consideration of certainways and means for the development of the South--and many leadingSoutherners present--he composed his speech out of an editorial tour deforce he was making in the Evening Post on The Homicidal Side of SouthernLife. Before he had proceeded half through General Grant, who knew of mywager, said, "You'll lose your bet," and, it being one o'clock in themorning, I thought so too, and did not care whether I won or lost it. Whenhe finished, the call on me was spontaneous and universal. "Now give it tohim good," said General Grant.

And I did; I declared--the reporters were long since gone--that there hadnot been a man killed amiss in Kentucky since the war; that where one hadbeen killed two should have been; and, amid roars of laughter which gave metime to frame some fresh absurdity, I delivered a prose paean to murder.

Nobody seemed more pleased than Schurz himself, and as we cameaway--General Grant having disappeared--he put his arm about me like aschoolboy and said: "Well, well, I had no idea you were so bloody-minded."

Chapter the Twenty-Fifth

Every Trade Has Its Tricks--I Play One on William McKinley--Far Away Party Politics and Political Issues

I

There are tricks in every trade. The tariff being the paramount issue ofthe day, I received a tempting money offer from Philadelphia to present myside of the question, but when the time fixed was about to arrive I foundmyself billed for a debate with no less an adversary than William McKinley,protectionist leader in the Lower House of Congress. We were the best offriends and I much objected to a joint meeting. The parties, however, wouldtake no denial, and it was arranged that we should be given alternatedates. Then it appeared that the designated thesis read: "Which politicalparty offers for the workingman the best solution of the tariff problem?"

Here was a poser. It required special preparation, for which I had not theleisure. I wanted the stipend, but was not willing--scarcely able--to payso much for it. I was about to throw the engagement over when a luckythought struck me. I had a cast-off lecture entitled Money and Morals. Ithad been rather popular. Why might I not put a head and tail to this--aforeword and a few words in conclusion--and make it meet the purpose andserve the occasion?

When the evening arrived there was a great audience. Half of the people hadcome to applaud, the other half to antagonize. I was received, however,with what seemed a united acclaim. When the cheering had ceased, with theblandest air I began:

"In that chapter of the history of Ireland which was reserved for theconsideration of snakes, the historian, true to the solecism as well as thebrevity of Irish wit, informs us that 'there are no snakes in Ireland.'

"I am afraid that on the present occasion I shall have to emulate thisflight of the Celtic imagination. I find myself billed to speak from aDemocratic standpoint as to which party offers the best practical means forthe benefit of the workingmen of the country. If I am to discharge withfidelity the duty thus assigned me, I must begin by repudiating the text intoto, because the Democratic Party recognizes no political agency for oneclass which is not equally open to all classes. The bulwark and belltowerof its faith, the source and resource of its strength are laid in thedeclaration, 'Freedom for all, special privileges to none,' which appliedto practical affairs would deny to self-styled workingmen, organized intoa cooeperative society, any political means not enjoyed by every otherorganized cooeperative society, and by each and every citizen, individually,to himself and his heirs and assigns, forever.

"But in a country like ours, what right has any body of men to get togetherand, labelling themselves workingmen, to talk about political means andpractical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the singleright to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine title of aworkingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in hislibrary, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and hislabor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, withdarkness and squalor closing him round about, and want maybe staring him inthe face, yet--if he be a true man--with a little bird singing ever in hisheart the song of hope and cheer which cradled the genius of Stephenson andArkwright and the long procession of inventors, lowly born, to whomthe world owes the glorious achievements of this, the greatest of thecenturies. We are all workingmen--the banker, the minister, the lawyer, thedoctor--toiling from day to day, and it may be we are well paid for ourtoil, to represent and to minister to the wants of the time no less thanthe farmer and the farmer's boy, rising with the lark to drive the teamafield, and to dally with land so rich it needs to be but tickled with ahoe to laugh a harvest.

"Having somewhat of an audacious fancy, I have sometimes in moments ofexuberance ventured upon the conceit that our Jupiter Tonans, the Americaneditor, seated upon his three-legged throne and enveloped by the majestyand the mystery of his pretentious 'we,' is a workingman no less than thepoor reporter, who year in and year out braves the perils of the midnightrounds through the slums of the city, yea in the more perilous temptationsof the town, yet carries with him into the darkest dens the love of work,the hope of reward and the fear only of dishonor.

"Why, the poor officeseeker at Washington begging a bit of that pie, which,having got his own slice, a cruel, hard-hearted President would eliminatefrom the bill of fare, he likewise is a workingman, and I can tell you avery hard-working man with a tough job of work, and were better breakingrock upon a turnpike in Dixie or splitting rails on a quarter section outin the wild and woolly West.

"It is true that, as stated on the program, I am a Democrat--as ArtemusWard once said of the horses in his panorama, I can conceal it nolonger--at least I am as good a Democrat as they have nowadays. But firstof all, I am an American, and in America every man who is not a policemanor a dude is a workingman. So, by your leave, my friends, instead ofsticking very closely to the text, and treating it from a purely partypoint of view, I propose to take a ramble through the highways and bywaysof life and thought in our beloved country and to cast a balance if I canfrom an American point of view.

"I want to say in the beginning that no party can save any man or any setof men from the daily toil by which all of us live and move and have ourbeing."

Then I worked in my old lecture.

It went like hot cakes. When next I met William McKinley he said jocosely:"You are a mean man, Henry Watterson!"

"How so?" I asked.

"I accepted the invitation to answer you because I wanted and needed themoney. Of course I had no time to prepare a special address. My idea was tomake my fee by ripping you up the back. But when I read the verbatim reportwhich had been prepared for me there was not a word with which I could takeissue, and that completely threw me out."

Then I told him how it had happened and we had a hearty laugh. He was themost lovable of men. That such a man should have fallen a victim to theblow of an assassin defies explanation, as did the murders of Lincoln andGarfield, like McKinley, amiable, kindly men giving never cause of personaloffense.

II

The murderer is past finding out. In one way and another I fancy that I amwell acquainted with the assassins of history. Of those who slew Caesar Ilearned in my schooldays, and between Ravaillac, who did the business forHenry of Navarre, and Booth and Guiteau, my familiar knowledge seems almostat first hand. One night at Chamberlin's, in Washington, George Corkhill,the district attorney who was prosecuting the murderer of Garfield, saidto me: "You will never fully understand this case until you have sat by methrough one day's proceedings in court." Next day I did this.

Never have I passed five hours in a theater so filled with thrills. Ioccupied a seat betwixt Corkhill and Scoville, Guiteau's brother-in-lawand voluntary attorney. I say "voluntary" because from the first Guiteaurejected him and vilely abused him, vociferously insisting upon being his